


Matchmakers

by Minnow_53



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Fluff and Humor, Fluffy Ending, Friends to Lovers, Getting Together, M/M, Marauders Era (Harry Potter), Romantic Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-08
Updated: 2020-09-08
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:07:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26355451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Minnow_53/pseuds/Minnow_53
Summary: James and Lily are determined to get Remus and Sirius together.  So Remus and Sirius keep finding themselves alone with each other.
Relationships: Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Comments: 6
Kudos: 99





	Matchmakers

**Author's Note:**

> First published on LiveJournal 2/5/05. Thanks to Asterie for the beta.

Lily Evans put James on to it, of course; James wasn’t the sort of guy to figure things out by himself.

‘Have Remus and Sirius ever had girlfriends?’ she asked him casually after a Head Girl and Head Boy’s meeting with Dumbledore.

‘They’ve not been as lucky as me,’ James said, gazing at her with shining eyes. ‘They haven’t met the right girls yet.’

‘Did it ever occur to you that they may not _like_ girls?’

James dropped the hand he had been massaging absent-mindedly. ‘Not like girls? Don’t be stupid! Who _would_ they like?’

Whereupon Lily said a few things to him that made his eyebrows shoot right into his hairline. 

‘Just watch them at dinner,’ she instructed.

*

Remus and Sirius sat next to each other at dinner, as always, and as always Sirius nicked Remus’s chips when he wasn’t looking. He couldn’t understand why James cleared his throat and looked at Lily across the table, and Lily nodded slightly.

He glanced questioningly at Remus who shrugged, and dipped one of his remaining chips into Sirius’s ketchup. 

‘What’s up, Prongs?’ Sirius asked.

‘You’re nicking Moony’s chips,’ James said, in a voice two octaves higher than usual.

‘Everyone nicks Moony’s chips. _You_ usually nick Moony’s chips.’

Lily and James both giggled. Sirius was annoyed, and turned to Remus and started a conversation about plans for the Divination trip to the Fortune Tellers’ Conference in London, which was taking place the following Thursday. They were soon absorbed in deep discussion about the accuracy of chicken entrails as a tool for prediction.

After dinner, James came up to the common room ten minutes later than anyone else, and out of breath. ‘Sirius, Remus,’ he panted, ‘just the two I was looking for. There’s an emergency meeting about the Divination trip. Professor Manatee told me he’s got some new information about the Portkeys, and you need to go and see him at once.’

Remus and Sirius set off for the Divination Tower, with James in tow, plus Lily, who had mysteriously appeared from nowhere. ‘It’s not in the classroom,’ James said, sounding a bit worried, and Lily said in soothing tones, ‘Follow me, Black, Lupin. He’s waiting on the third floor corridor. Didn’t want you to have the long walk. Look, he’s in here.’ She opened a door, and Remus and Sirius obediently went through it.

‘Hey, what’s all this?’ Sirius cried as the door slammed shut behind them, and he heard James casting what was unmistakeably a locking charm. He turned to Remus, who said, ‘What the hell?'

‘Moony, did I just imagine that James has locked us in a broom cupboard?’ Sirius sounded on the edge of hysteria, not to mention rage. ‘Am I missing something? It’s not April Fool’s Day or anything, is it?'

What's more, it was a very small broom cupboard; so small that Sirius wondered how he and Remus had both managed to squeeze into it in the first place.

‘Lily must have put a shrinking charm on it,’ Remus said looking round. Not that there was much to look round at. The brooms were for sweeping, not for flying, and they were forlorn specimens, lacking many of their twigs. 

The space was so tiny that he and Sirius were pressed very close together; so close that virtually every part of their bodies was touching.

‘Why the hell did he do that for?’ Sirius continued. ‘Moony, you don’t think Lily’s driven him mad, do you?’

Remus didn’t answer, but started banging on the door and screaming, ‘Hey, let us out!’

James was still standing right outside, but he spoke rather more loudly than usual. ‘We’ll let you out later. Just have a nice chat, okay? Lily and I are off now, so you’ll have plenty of privacy.’

Sirius and Remus stared at each other as James and Lily’s footsteps receded. They couldn’t help it: their faces were practically touching. 

The close proximity was quite comforting, though, especially when the overhead lamp flickered and died. ‘We shouldn’t have left our wands upstairs,’ Remus grumbled.

‘Couldn’t have got them out of our pockets anyway,’ Sirius said.

In order to keep their circulations going, they found, they had to put their arms around each other. Sirius could hear Remus’s heart thumping, and he decided it was like the rhythm of a bass drum.

‘We could pretend to be a band,’ he suggested, shifting a bit so his mouth was near Remus’s ear. ‘You drum and I’ll sing. Can you feel my heart beating as well?’

‘Yes,’ Remus countered. ‘And I want to sing too.’

They didn’t find it too difficult to decide _what_ to sing. Sirius’s musical education consisted of wizarding classics from the eighteenth century, most notably the works of one particular ancestor, Coriandum Black. Black had written mainly pieces for the harpsichord, which were impossible to sing, even if you wanted to. Not many did.

Remus had been brought up with a rather wider range, though his wizarding father favoured ancient folk songs about dragons and goblins. 

Fortunately, there were many Muggle-borns in Gryffindor, so even purebloods like Sirius had acquired some knowledge of pop music, and everyone liked it far better than the dreary stuff played on the WWN. 

Neither of them had a great voice. Sirius was slightly tone-deaf, and Remus tended to enunciate every word, which meant he lagged seriously behind any musical accompaniment. Together, though, they thought they sounded quite good, and their vocal faults were somehow cancelled out. 

‘It doesn’t matter that you’re a bit slow with the words,’ Sirius said kindly. ‘We’ll just sing the whole thing more slowly and then you’ll sound fine.’

They sang their way through all the Beatles songs they knew, then got on to the more complex songs of David Bowie, a favourite of Lily Evans and her friends. They worked out some nice harmonies, and were just practising the Beatles songs again when the door clicked open. James and Lily stood there, aghast.

‘What was that awful noise?’ James demanded. He looked quite angry, for some reason.

‘We were singing,’ Remus explained. He couldn’t understand why James gave Lily a really filthy look.

‘I thought it sounded fine,’ Sirius muttered as they followed James and Lily back to Gryffindor Tower. He was so annoyed at their criticism of the singing that he completely forgot to ask why he and Remus had been shut in the broom cupboard in the first place, and Remus was too busy humming _This Boy_ to think of anything else.

*

Two days later, Remus and Sirius were summoned to Professor McGonagall’s office. She looked grimmer than Remus had ever seen her, even that time he was caught with _Horribly Holistic Hexes_ , which he didn’t have permission to remove from the Restricted Section. Sirius, of course, was used to McGonagall’s office and her tight-lipped expression.

She didn’t invite them to sit down.

‘Mr Black, Mr Lupin. The Head Boy and Head Girl have just told me that you two have been misbehaving in the Great Hall,’ she said.

Remus and Sirius stared at each other. ‘I think there’s been some mistake, Professor McGonagall,’ Sirius said in his politest voice, which was also quite chilly.

‘I think not, Mr. Black. Let me enlighten you.’ She read from a list in James’s distinctive scrawl. ‘Throwing sausages at the First Years. That’s not only a wicked waste of food, but a terrible example. A cake fight. No, I don’t even want to know what that involved. Something about butter smeared over the porridge, I think. Really, Mr Potter’s handwriting! Salt in the sugar bowl…’

‘But, we never did anything like that!’ Remus sputtered.

Professor McGonagall ignored him. ‘Now, I agree with Mr Potter that this calls for a detention. He and Miss Evans thought you should share it, so you learn to do something constructive together rather than messing about with food. This evening, you will report to the greenhouses to re-pot a few mandrakes. No, Mr. Black, no discussion. You are both dismissed.’

‘I am so going to kill Prongs!’ Sirius said through gritted teeth. ‘What the hell is he up to?’

But James was nowhere to be found, and he managed to avoid dinner too, as did Lily Evans. Sirius hoped they were both starving to death somewhere, the way they deserved. He was glad James had missed his favourite, trifle, but also sorry not to have a chance to get his own back: if James had been there, his friends might have been tempted to do something rather worse to his food than anything on his fictitious list. 

Greenhouse Two was small and cramped, and McGonagall set the boys to working side by side. ‘To stop you fighting.’

When she’d gone, Remus and Sirius looked at each other with raised eyebrows.

‘We don’t fight, do we?’ Remus asked.

Sirius laughed. ‘Don’t sound so unsure! No, we don’t. We get on really well, actually. But I _will_ fight bloody Prongs if he ever dares show his face again.’

Still, they both found it quite soothing to work in close proximity, their elbows often bumping as they twisted the recalcitrant mandrakes into their pots. A while in, Sirius started humming one of the Beatles songs they’d been singing, and they tried out a couple of the new harmonies. The mandrakes didn’t like that, though, and started squealing, so they were forced to stop.

Then, they got into a very interesting discussion about why girls were so strange, especially Lily Evans. They concluded that it was the shoes and the hair. 

‘The shoes are just weird. They must stop girls from thinking,’ Remus said. ‘The heels are pointy too. I think they look dangerous.’

‘And I know my hair’s quite long,’ Sirius said, tossing his black mane, ‘but it doesn’t seem to eat at my brain like a girl’s hair does.’

Remus thought Sirius’s hair was lovely, and he said so, emboldened by their closeness and the dim light. Sirius was pleased, and said he thought Remus’s hair was nice too. Remus said, oh, no, it wasn’t, it was just plain mousy hair, and Sirius said no, it had gorgeous golden highlights, especially when the sun shone on it, and then they both giggled and agreed that they sounded as bad as a pair of girls. Neither of them would have dreamed of admitting that to anyone else, especially James, and they ended the evening in good spirits and went back to the castle arm in arm.

James and Lily were waiting for them in the common room with expectant looks on their faces, and both of them smiled broadly when the two boys appeared looking so happy. But the second Sirius saw James, he let go of Remus’s arm, and his eyes grew cold and stony.

‘What the hell are you playing at, Potter?’ he snarled, drawing his wand. ‘Why are you going round telling McGonagall lies about us?’

James drew his own wand. ‘It was just a prank, Padfoot. Put that bloody wand down. C’mon, down, boy!’

The dog in Sirius obeyed, but he still glowered at his friend.

‘Anyway, you two seem to have had a pleasant evening,’ Lily chimed in, rather suggestively, Sirius felt.

They both shrugged. ‘C’mon, Moony, let’s get up to the dorm, and leave these two _lovebirds_ to it,’ Sirius said in what was meant to be a withering tone, and almost succeeded.

* 

The next day, James and Lily hopefully eyed Remus and Sirius at breakfast, but saw no particular change in them. They chatted away happily, but then, they always did. 

While Peter was turned away talking to the pretty Hufflepuff who sat behind him, James leaned over towards him and quick as a flash swished his wand and muttered something. Lily nodded approvingly. Remus and Sirius were betting on whether Severus Snape would deign to smile back at the girl grinning manically at him from across the Slytherin table, so they didn’t notice.

Peter turned round again, rather reluctantly, took a big spoonful of cereal, then dropped off his chair in a dead faint. James gave Lily a high five.

When Remus and Sirius went to see Peter in the Hospital Wing at break, Madam Pomfrey told them that he would be fine in a couple of days. ‘Someone put a swooning spell on him,’ she explained. ‘It’s quite tricky to take off, because the patient could faint again any time for the next forty-eight hours. So we’ll keep an eye on him in here.’

Peter was by then sitting up in bed, eating a doughnut, and drinking a vanilla milkshake through a stripy yellow straw. He seemed quite cheerful, in fact, especially as he was missing a big test in Care of Magical Creatures. Remus and Sirius left the _Get Well Soon_ card they’d made for him in Muggle Studies – a very boring card that didn’t move, as it had been coloured in with non-magical felt-tip pens – and went back to their lessons.

That evening, as they were sitting in the common room, James kept glancing at his watch, and looking over to the table where Remus and Sirius were working on their Divination homework and analysing each other’s astrological charts. The homework was synastry, and they had to take their charts and compare them to find the similarities. They were discovering that they were very compatible, and both found it amusing that their charts had what Zara the Seeress, author of the NEWTs Divination textbook, called ‘The Marriage Configuration’.

‘My moon’s on your sun,’ Remus informed Sirius.

Sirius nudged him. ‘That sounds painful, Lupin.’ He sniggered.

‘Uh, sorry to interrupt you, guys, but it’s bedtime,’ James said. ‘Bell’s about to go.’

Remus and Sirius looked at him blankly. ‘So?’ Sirius said. ‘You’re not up in the dorm yet, _Head Boy_.’ He emphasised the last two words in a very irritated tone of voice.

‘No. Lily and I have to go and look after the Fourth Years doing their Wizarding Adventurers Award,’ James said. ‘They’re camping out by the lake tonight, and we need to supervise. Better go up, though. Remember, Peter’s in the Hospital Wing so you’ll have the dorm all to yourselves.’ He spoke the last words very slowly, to make certain his friends understood.

‘Oh, sure,’ Sirius said vacantly, and he and Remus rolled up their respective star-charts and their synastry chart and tied them all neatly with blue ribbons, ready to give in.

The dorm was very quiet without James and Peter, especially Peter, who liked to talk after lights-out and tell his friends in detail what he’d been doing that day, while James would intervene from time to time to tell him to shut up, or correct him, or amplify one of his Quidditch anecdotes.

Remus and Sirius lay in their beds next to each other with the curtains open and continued to chat about synastry.

‘That moon and sun thing’s strange, isn’t it?’ Sirius asked. ‘Considering that your life is ruled by the moon and Sirius is a star, like the sun.’

‘We’ve also got your Mercury and my Mars in aspect,’ said Remus, yawning widely. ‘And some weird thing going on with Venus and Pluto, which is convenient, as they’re the hottest and coldest planets.’

‘Talking of coldest, it must be freezing out by the lake,’ Sirius remarked, shivering. ‘It’s cold enough in here. Imagine having to camp out in the middle of winter.’

‘It’s nearly May,’ Remus pointed out. 

‘Yeah, but still.’ Sirius’s teeth started to chatter. Remus, who had the bed by the fire, was concerned, and said, ‘Come into my bed, Padfoot. It’s much warmer.’

‘I think I will. Thanks. Ridiculous needing a fire at this time of year, isn’t it?’

Sirius fetched his bedclothes and piled them on top of Remus’s, and they snuggled together in the bed until they were both very warm, and they fell asleep quite happily, cuddled up to each other. In the morning, when they woke up together, they chatted about the day to come and the Muggle Studies lesson that morning, and they agreed that sleeping with a girl could surely not compare to curling up in bed with one of your best mates.

*

At breakfast, Lily asked pointedly, ‘Did you two sleep well last night?’

‘Brilliantly,’ said Remus. 

‘You and Prongs must have been frozen half to death outside,’ Sirius said. He privately thought it served them right for telling tales to McGonagall, especially when those tales weren’t even true.

‘Oh, well, we put Warming Charms on everyone,’ Lily said airily. ‘I bet you two needed a Cooling Charm, though, didn’t you?’

James laughed at that, and snorted pumpkin juice all over the table. ‘I gather Pete’s going to be in the Hospital Wing another night, too.’

‘He’ll be much warmer there,’ Remus said. ‘Pomfrey always has about three fires going at once.’

‘Have you ever noticed,’ Lily said, with a slight edge of desperation, ‘how you two complement each other? Don’t you agree, James? Lupin is fair and pale, and Black is dark and pale…’ She fizzled out.

‘Oh, Sirius is the handsome one,’ Remus said, remembering in time not to use the word ‘beautiful’ in front of Lily.

Sirius dropped his fork with a clatter. ‘Oh, come on! You look really good in your jeans. And your eyes are so many colours, like green and blue and brown, all together.’

‘The colour’s called hazel,’ Remus said modestly.

‘Goodness knows why. Hazel always sounds just brown, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes. But I think grey eyes are the best, really. They’re so different.’

Lily positively beamed at them both. ‘Absolutely! Good boys.’

Remus and Sirius gave her quizzical looks and glanced at each other, rolling their respectively hazel and grey eyes. ‘Lupin, is your bacon a bit overdone this morning?’ Sirius asked.

‘It’s fine, Black. But the eggs are rather hard.’ 

The Head Girl and Boy had to stop an argument about toast at the other end of the Gryffindor table, and while their attention was diverted, Remus turned to Sirius and said, ‘You know, Prongs and Lily are behaving really weirdly. D’you think they’ve been jinxed?’

‘Check out Lily’s shoes,’ Sirius said darkly. ‘Pink and shiny, with stiletto heels. I blame them.’

Remus pointed out that James was wearing sensible school shoes. ‘I think we should go to the library and look up hexes and counter-curses before school.’

By this time, Lily and James were back in their places and seemed ready for another onslaught, so Remus and Sirius hastily pushed back their chairs and set off together, after a desultory ‘See you’ to their friends.

Up in the library, Remus said, ‘We need to be methodical, Sirius. Right?’

Sirius sat at the table opposite him, quill poised over parchment. ‘We don’t have time, Moony. Listen, they’ve been telling lies about us to McGonagall. They’re been sniggering and smirking and staring at us, and I don’t like it. I can’t think of any hex that could do that. Except maybe some variation on a stalking hex, but they’re not following us. They’re leaving us alone.’

Remus sucked the tip of his own quill, and said, ‘It’s like they keep _deliberately_ leaving us alone. That broom cupboard, and the detention. When do two people ever have detention together? You and Prongs never do.’

‘We did once. When we had to weed the pumpkin patch. Of course, you and Wormtail were there too.’ 

‘But really, Padfoot. Why on earth would they shut us in a broom cupboard?’

‘Search me. But I think we could give them a real shock if we pretended that being alone together had had an effect on us.’ Sirius gave an evil grin.

Remus grinned back, and soon the head of luxuriant black hair and the head of mousy hair with gorgeous golden highlights were close together, as the two of them plotted and planned in their turn to give James and Lily the shock of their lives. 

They just had time to nip up to see Peter before morning lessons. The swooning spell was having its kickback effect, and Peter fainted twice during the brief visit. His breakfast tray, the standard Infirmary fare of toast and Bovril, was largely untouched. ‘At least I miss Potions this morning,’ he croaked, before starting to pass out again. 

‘He looked awfully ill,’ Remus said, concerned. ‘Poor Wormtail.’

‘Lucky bugger,’ Sirius said. ‘We’re doing the final part of our Veritaserum today, and it’s bloody difficult.’

‘I bet,’ said Remus smugly, gathering his Arithmancy books. ‘Have fun.’

Sirius reflected for a moment how much he missed Remus in Potions, now Remus had given up the subject, to Professor Slughorn’s intense relief. They were always partnered together, because Remus was so bad and Sirius was so good, and many times Sirius had had to do an emergency rescue when Remus screwed up.

Today, he was allowed to work with James as Peter was away. For some reason, James, who was usually quite easy-going, and confident in his great ability to do Potions, seemed very concerned to get the Veritaserum absolutely right.

While Sirius was bottling the potion to give to the professor, James sneaked enough to fill a small vial, corked it and put it in the pocket of his robes.

*

In the common room that evening, James and Lily sat at a table and watched Remus and Sirius, who were sprawled on a sofa, watching James and Lily in their turn. When they were sure that their friends – or former friends – were once again looking, Sirius gave Remus an almost imperceptible nod, put his arms round him and hugged him, saying loudly enough for James and Lily to hear, ‘I’ve been longing to do that all day, Moony.’

James and Lily gasped.

Remus hugged Sirius back. ‘That feels fantastic,’ Sirius said, and Remus replied, rather weakly, ‘It certainly does, Padfoot. We should do this more often,' he added, with slightly more conviction.

Lily and James couldn’t see that Sirius was now shaking with mirth, his head still on Remus’s shoulder.

He controlled himself for long enough to look up at James and Lily with an outraged expression, and say, ‘What are you staring at?

James, who was scarlet, stuttered, ‘Guys, perhaps you could take that somewhere else?’

Remus burst out laughing at that, and he and Sirius both howled at the sight of James’s discomfort. Sirius got up and gave a theatrical bow. ‘You wanted it. You got it. Now, stop being such a git, Prongs. Moony and I need to do our homework in peace.’

The other occupants of the common room had all stopped dead in their tracks, quills suspended over parchment, chess games frozen in mid-move, cards floating over tables, and were gawping at the four in front of the fire. ‘Okay, show’s over,’ Sirius said loudly, so everyone could hear. ‘Glad you enjoyed it.’

‘Did _you_ , though?’ asked Lily. Remus got the distinct impression that she was a bit disappointed they hadn’t actually kissed. They had discussed it, but there didn’t seem any need to go too far.

‘Prongs, shut your girlfriend up,’ Sirius groaned. 

From behind Sirius’s back, James mouthed, ‘Plan B,’ to Lily and she gave a little nod.

‘Well, that was funny, mates,’ James said in a hearty voice. He then poked about in his schoolbag, sang out ‘Ta ra!’ and produced four bottles of Butterbeer. ‘No hard feelings, right?’

‘I am not playing Spin the Bottle,’ Remus said flatly. ‘Not now, not ever.’

‘Moony, these are to drink, you moron,’ James said. ‘Look, they’re already open. Convenient, eh?’

‘As long as you don’t spin it.’ Remus reached out and James handed him a bottle, then handed one to Sirius, who was now deep in contemplation of an Ancient Runes diagram, and put it down beside him untasted. Remus, however, took a big swig of his before setting it down on the floor. He thought it tasted rather unpleasant, but he didn’t want to hurt James’s feelings by implying his peace-offering, or whatever it was, was substandard.

Remus had a funny tingling feeling in his fingers, and when he saw Sirius was raising the bottle rather vaguely to his lips, he was tempted to stop him.

Sirius made a face and said, ‘This is bit off, Prongs. Bitter.’ He also felt a strange tingling in his fingers, and glanced at Remus questioningly.

‘Right,’ James said. ‘We just wanted to ask you something.’

Both Remus and Sirius kept their mouths resolutely clamped shut. 

James and Lily moved in for the kill, crouching on the hearth in front of the sofa.

‘Tell me, Black, who do you fancy?’ Lily asked. It had been agreed that she would interrogate Sirius and James would interrogate Remus.

Sirius looked up at the ceiling and hummed. He was tempted to start singing again, but he didn’t want to open his mouth. The words ‘that pretty girl who always sits by herself on the Slytherin table’, his standard answer, wouldn’t quite formulate themselves in his mind, mainly because that pretty girl was entirely mythical, and only invented to shut Prongs and Peter up when they probed into his love-life.

He risked a look at Remus, whose expression resembled that of a man in the path of a speeding train, with no means of escape. 

‘How about you, Moony?’ James asked.

‘Nobody,’ said Remus. ‘Nobody,’ he repeated firmly. ‘There’s no girl I fancy. None. Except perhaps that girl over there, the Sixth Year. Angie, or whatever her name is. But I don’t fancy her a lot. Not enough to ask her out.’

‘I meant who of _everyone_ do you fancy,’ James said. ‘Nobody asked if you fancied a girl.’

Remus glanced at Sirius, his eyes wide and full of mute appeal.

Sirius started talking very fast. ‘My name is Sirius Black, I go to school at Hogwarts, I hate my mother, the sky isn’t really blue, it’s just an optical illusion, the sea isn’t really green, it’s clear, but it reflects the light from the sky and because of the shadows it’s less bright, but it’s also an optical illusion, at this moment I could kill James Potter and Lily Evans…’ He took a deep breath. ‘There. I think it’s worn off. Moony, don’t talk. They’ve put Veritaserum in the Butterbeer.’

‘Sirius,’ Remus said.

‘Take it easy, Moony. It’s okay. Just don’t talk.’

‘No, I mean I fancy Sirius,’ Remus explained to James. ‘To be honest, I really didn’t want to tell you that, it just slipped out. Now, I feel like going and cutting my throat, and I’ll use your stupid bloody Muggle razor to do it, and then you’ll be sorry. Serve you right.’

Sirius was staring at him. ‘Do you really, Remus?’

‘Yes. But I won’t do it in public. I’ll go to the Shack or somewhere. There’s enough blood there with – ’

Sirius leaned across and put his hand over Remus’s mouth. ‘Shhh. Not another word. I didn’t mean cutting your throat, you pillock. I mean, do you really fancy me?’

‘Yefff,’ Remus said, nodding enthusiastically, his words muffled by Sirius’s hand.

Sirius beamed at him. ‘That’s amazing! Because I fancy you too. It was great hugging you earlier. I loved it. Oh. Maybe the stuff hasn’t worn off after all. I really want to kiss you, and I don’t mind that every single person in the common room is now staring at us again.’

‘I mind, Sirius. Can we go and do it somewhere else?’

‘Sure. The dorm. Peter’s still sick, and if Potter has any sense, he’ll stay well away from us for at least the next twenty-four hours.’

They got up and went upstairs, hand in hand. The common room was absolutely silent, and all eyes were riveted on them as they disappeared.

*

‘You know everyone’s going to be gossiping about us?’ Remus said a while later, idly running his hands through Sirius’s hair, which was now damp and sweaty but still very luxuriant, of course.

‘Well, I wouldn’t worry about that,’ Sirius said. ‘We won’t be seeing them again in a hurry, anyway, will we? Got to make up for lost time. Why on earth didn’t you tell me earlier?’

‘I wasn’t quite sure,’ Remus said. ‘Not till we were shut in the cupboard together. When you worked out the harmony for _Day Tripper._ That was great. And you’re a bit off key sometimes, but I really like your voice. When did _you_ know?’

‘A little while ago,’ Sirius said. ‘I don’t sing off key, do I?’

‘No, you don’t,’ said Remus reassuringly, realising that the Veritaserum had definitely worn off now. ‘And I liked you before then. I always fancied you.’

‘We’ll just tell people it was a joke,’ Sirius said, gazing deep into the hazel eyes that he loved so very much.

‘But it isn’t, is it?’

‘No, it isn’t. Come here, I want to kiss you again.’

They kissed for a while, then told each other how much they liked each other, and were complimentary about each other’s voices and hair and eyes and clothes again. ‘I know I mentioned the jeans, but I do like your school robes, Moony. They look really good.’ They then discussed skin and its softness or lack of softness, and how they both were a bit goose-bumpy in the cold, and should get into Remus’s bed by the fire to warm up.

‘Prongs won’t dare come anywhere near us tonight,’ Sirius said. ‘Though I suppose we should thank him, really.’

‘Probably. Move over, Sirius, you have all the bedclothes.’

‘They’re my bedclothes too.’

They had a friendly tussle over the bedclothes, then fell fast asleep, and dreamed of each other and all the fun they were going to have now they were together. They woke up a couple of times in the night and shifted a bit closer, not sure whether they were still sleeping or not. Occasionally, a snatch of song would weave its way into their dreams, or the tiny, shrill cry of a mandrake, or the optical illusion of a bright blue sky, complete with yellow sun.

**End**


End file.
